


A Challenge Accepted

by Time_Sequence



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:48:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26122963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Time_Sequence/pseuds/Time_Sequence
Summary: Upon reembodiment in Valinor, Fëanor finds that he has a new grandson. However, try as he might, he just can’t seem to figure out which of his sons is the father.
Comments: 105
Kudos: 239





	1. Chapter 1

It was late in the course of the world when Fëanáro Curufinwë was reembodied in Valinor.

His first initial shock was that his son Nelyo had been reembodied with only one hand – “I lived for so long without it that I wouldn’t use it anyway,” – but after the initial few weeks of reuniting and reconciling with his close family, the second shock came. A new grandson.

“You mean to tell me,” Fëanáro said, pulling a shirt over his head as he readied himself for a day in the forge, “that we have _seven_ children, and yet they’ve only managed to give us _two_ grandchildren? My brothers have enough descendants between them to start their own communes!”

“Then you should be glad they don’t all want to live under each other’s noses, because I don’t think I’d hear the end of it if your brothers both ran their own city states, with a population of only their own descendants,” Nerdanel retorted.

Fëanáro grimaced at the thought.

“But still – what were they _doing_ in Beleriand?”

“Fighting a war?”

“So were Ñolofinwë’s brood.”

Fëanáro caught the ghost of a smile on his wife’s face at the mention of Ñolofinwë’s umpteen children and grandchildren, but let it slide. He would be meeting this new grandchild soon and any petty sibling rivalries were lost in his excitement.

*

If only two grandchildren were truly his lot, Fëanáro found himself quite satisfied with Celebrimbor and Elrond. Celebrimbor looked just like Curvo, and by extension, just like himself, although the distance in generations had fortunately mellowed Fëanáro’s fiery nature into the friendly laughter of his grandson. Then, there was Elrond, the new grandson.

Celebrimbor had been a surprise. Fëanáro had known him as a child, giggling as he ran between his legs or asking questions of his grandfather as he carried him perched upon his hip around his forge, and here he was, fully grown and reembodied as a leader who had lived through more than he could imagine. There was a slight sharpness to him now – he still gave his smiles freely, but Fëanáro could tell he trusted less.

But if meeting Celebrimbor again had been an exercise in relearning a loved one’s idiosyncrasies, his new grandson Elrond was completely new – born and raised in Beleriand thousands of years after Fëanáro’s passing into a world he couldn’t imagine. There were no wounds to accidentally prod, or landmines to step on with Elrond, only long meandering conversations which continued into the night where Elrond answered every linguistic question he could think to pose about the languages of Beleriand, ancient and modern. Elrond spoke ancient and modern Dwarvish, Sindarin, and several tongues of men – _and_ , Fëanáro noted with pride, he spoke Quenya like a Fëanorian. He couldn’t help but feel some smugness in the fact that his own linguistic stamp had managed to outlast him for so long, in one who had never even met him.

“My wife and children always used to make fun of me for it,” Elrond shrugged.

“Well, I wouldn’t expect one of Galadriel’s to understand,” Fëanáro responded with a cheeky twinkle in his eye. Old rivalries might have been forgiven, but there were still some hills he was willing to die on.

One thing did puzzle him, though. Whose child _was_ Elrond?

Normally, he wouldn’t be above asking, but one night he had overheard his sons laughing together in the kitchen. It was the kind of boyish joy that he hadn’t heard in… well, millennia, and he was immediately taken back to childhoods of muddy feet and painted hands, play fighting and shrieks of laughter. It had never been a quiet house. When Fëanáro had opened his eyes again for the first time in Valinor, in many ways his sons had been complete strangers to him, changed beyond recognition after living twice if not four times as long as he had. So, to hear that banter again felt like a salve. Fëanáro rested his hand on the doorjamb remaining outside and closed his eyes, letting the sound of it wash over him.

“We really should tell him, you know.”

“Oh, Káno, don’t be a spoilsport. Don’t ruin the fun.” Turko, always stirring up trouble. “Do you really want to pass up to look on dad’s face when he finds out who Elrond’s father is?”

Fëanáro’s mind started whirring at this, but he stayed quiet, listening. Now it really was like the old days – his sons had no idea how many of their pranks and schemes he had overheard in their development phase in exactly the same way that he was listening now. The thrill of it – of something so agonisingly normal and mundane – made him listen more closely.

“There’s precious little left to reveal to him as it is.” Curvo. “Unless you count your dalliance with Haleth, Carnistir.”

“Oh, don’t bring that up again. _Nothing happened_.”

Curvo cut across him, “Sure.”

“If you’d met her, nothing would have happened either. She had teeth, that one.”

“Which is why she’s exactly your type.”

“ _Anyway_ , you’re saying you really don’t want to play with father like this? It’ll be so much fun.”

If they wanted to play a game with Elrond’s parentage, he would just have to meet them measure for measure.


	2. Chapter 2

By process of elimination, Elrond couldn’t be Pityo’s son. It was an unfortunate thought to have to have, but it did leave only six players left in the running, and if you gave Fëanáro a puzzle to solve, he would make damned sure he did.

Curvo was his next guess – the first of his sons to have a grandchild. It did make sense that, as the only one to have felt the inclination to have children thus far, it would be Curvo again.

That really would be the icing on the cake – seven sons and only one had children in the thousands of years they had all been alive.

But Elrond didn’t really look like Curvo, or Curvo’s wife Ferinya, for that matter. And, at any rate, the relationship between Celebrimbor and Elrond when they were together didn’t really seem to be one of brothers, but rather one of long-term colleagues who had since fallen into friendship.

No, Curvo couldn’t be Elrond’s father. Besides, he had been too gleeful in his plan to fool him. Fëanáro amended the list that was forming in his head. That just left five other prospective candidates.

*

“Who in the family do you think Elrond most looks like?” Fëanáro asked Nerdanel over a cup of tea.

She raised an eyebrow and the look in her eye told him immediately that she was in on the boys’ scheme. _Fine. If that was how she wanted to play…_

Her answer, which she gave after a pause, gave him cause to consider.

“I think he takes more after his mother’s side of the family, though there are elements of Turgon in him. He has his ears.”

_Turgon_? Nerdanel saw the look in his face and shook her head. “He’s not the young man you remember any more.”

He supposed he could see it now that she had said it – the set of his shoulders, his tall frame. He had never really paid his nephew much attention – his siblings had always been so boisterous that he had generally slipped under the radar, and he had married into the Vanyar, instead of remaining under his feet like Fingon and Aredhel. But something told him that Nerdanel was playing with him. She had cast her net a little too wide in their family pool, in his opinion.

Turgon had inherited that frame from Finwë, anyway, he rationalised.

Still, he chewed on the information. Elrond looked more like his mother’s side of the family. No wonder his sons were having so much fun hiding his parentage from him. This, he could work with.

*

Yet more clues came on a trip with Elrond into Formenos when they were greeted by the Maia Olórin. Fëanáro was still wary of the Ainur – his old habits hadn’t died with him, it would seem – but Elrond embraced him as an old friend.

“My Lord Elrond Peredhil,” Olórin boomed. “I haven’t seen you for weeks!”

“Now, now, enough of that ‘lord’ business. I haven’t been a lord for quite some time, my friend.”

“True enough,” Olórin chuckled. “You must make time to visit Bilbo when you’re next in the area, though. Your absence has been noted by Mr Baggins of late.” Olórin’s eyes twinkled.

“I’ll make it my highest priority,” Elrond laughed.

When they carried on their way, Fëanáro turned to Elrond. “What did he call you? Peredhil?”

“Oh, that?” Elrond said, absentmindedly. “It means half-elven. You really should come and meet Bilbo when I visit, you know. He’s as opinionated as you are.”

*

Bilbo Baggins, it turned out, was something called a _hobbit_.

Though Fëanáro had felt some misgivings about entering the hole in the ground in which this elderly little creature lived, once inside he found the house to be quite charming, filled with home comforts he had never even considered himself to need, though he did bang his head on the light fittings a couple of times for good measure before adjusting to the height restrictions of the ceiling. For his part, the hobbit seemed delighted and he heard him say, “Just fancy it! Fëanor himself banging his head on my chandelier. Oh, just wait until I tell Frodo!” as he went to fetch a cheese board from a warren of storerooms.

“He keeps track, you know,” Elrond said, once Bilbo was out of earshot.

“Sorry?”

“Of where we bang our heads. Glorfindel was that beam over there. Olórin, the chandelier, like you. Galadriel, the door frame. Oh, and Finrod caught himself standing up too quickly, or so I’m told. He says it’s payback for all the books that were shelved too high for him to reach in elvish libraries – by which he means _my_ library in Rivendell, of course. Expect lots of questions, he’s quite the lore master.”

True to his words, Elrond sat back and ate his cheese spread as Bilbo barraged him with questions upon his return. Luckily, they were match enough for each other, because Fëanáro had questions of his own about hobbits and the place they were from, this so-called _Shire_.

It didn’t feel like any time had passed at all, but soon Elrond was taking his leave of them to return to his family for the evening meal. Darkness was closing in around them, but Bilbo showed no sign of wanting to stop the conversation and Fëanáro found he didn’t want to either, so they stayed up until the wee hours, discussing everything from complex family trees, to the invention of the game of golf. Then Bilbo opened a bottle of brandy and the conversation really started to get interesting.

“Elrond – ” Fëanáro hiccupped, “told me today that he’s half-elven? _Half-elven._ What’s the other half? He’s not a – a cousin of yours, is he? Although, I suppose he would be quite a bit shorter if he were…?”

Bilbo seemed to be holding his liquor much better than him, which he vaguely registered with surprise, given just how short he was. He was still fairly far gone, though.

“Half – half – _oh_ , you mean Peredhil?”

“Exactly.”

“Oh, but he’s half human – the Big Folk, you know. ‘Cept you elves, of course. I s’pose you’re big, too… It’s quite a famous story, mind you.”

“Is it?”

“Beren and Lúthien! Classic story, just beautiful.” Bilbo’s eyes turned a little misty. “She was an elf maiden who fell in love with a mortal man – went down to Mandos to get him back from death. There are lots of songs about it, are you sure you’ve never heard of them?”

“I was busy being dead.”

“Right. Yes. Of course.”

Fëanáro poured himself another glass and clinked it with Bilbo’s and the hobbit relaxed again.

Now that he came to think about it, he did remember some sort of commotion in the Halls a few thousand years ago, though being a disembodied fëa at the time, he hadn’t had the foggiest clue what was happening. He pushed the thought away quickly with a shudder. The Halls weren’t exactly the most welcoming of resting places.

“Anyway – that’s his mother’s side. And remarkably, he’s half elven on his father’s side, too, though that story’s not nearly as poetic. Less romantic songs, anyway.”

Fëanáro couldn’t believe his luck. Half edain? He knew exactly which of his sons he needed to speak to. What had Curvo called her? Haleth?

_Carnistir._

Oh, this was too easy. His boys were going to have to work harder than this. Game, set and match.


	3. Chapter 3

Their trip to the lake was the first time they had been there all together since the twins had been just old enough to swim. Of course, they had returned since, but never all nine of them together, picnic baskets in tow, to make the most of the summer afternoon. Feeling the warmth of the sun on his face was still an unbridled pleasure after such a long time in Mandos. He knew from speaking to others who had been reembodied that simple joys – light and warmth – were among the best things about returning to life again, especially for those who had been in the Halls for much longer. Fëanáro allowed his eyes to close, enjoying the sun’s rays on his face and the sound of his sons horsing around in the water.

When he opened his eyes again, he was being shaken awake to join them for food, as they all chatted and enjoyed each other’s company.

The sun was setting, casting red and pink streaks across the sky as they headed back and Fëanáro lagged behind, feeling the beauty of it knock the wind out of his chest. He realised with a start that this must be his first sunset, or at least the first sunset he had really taken note of.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Carnistir had waited for him and now fell in step at his side. “Did you ever see a sunset before?”

“No. The sun didn’t exist then.”

“Sometimes I find it hard to keep track, you know. What came first. Who was where. It was a very long life.”

Fëanáro nodded, though he supposed his own life had burnt itself out in the blink of an eye in comparison to his sons. Spirit of fire, indeed. And then there was Káno, who had finally seen fit to join his brothers on these shores, long after they had all been reembodied. His first words to his brothers had been _“I win.”_

Brothers were always brothers, it seemed.

“Was it a good life?” Fëanáro heard himself ask, barely registering the question in his mind before it was out, hanging between them.

Carnistir was the most singular of his sons – always had been. The others had naturally paired off when it came to their closest sibling relationship. He and Nerdanel might have worried had Carnistir not had a good set of his own friends outside of the family to wreak havoc with. A by-product of this was that Carnistir was unfailingly honest about his feelings, even if it was something his family might not want to hear. Fëanáro knew he would give an honest answer, not dodge the question or give the vague responses he had received from his other sons because they were worried about hurting his feelings while he was still adjusting to his new life.

“Honestly? A lot of it was utter crap,” Carnistir said, but there was a grin on his face. “I’d love to say you royally screwed things up for us, but I don’t remember us disagreeing very much at the time. And I’ve always been argumentative!”

A laugh spilled out of Fëanáro.

“There were lots of good bits, though. They shine brighter for all the darkness.”

Silence fell between them as they continued walking. Ahead, Nelyo was deep in conversation with Nerdanel, their red hair catching in the dying sun’s rays, and Káno was kicking stones with Curvo and Turko.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Fëanáro said, feeling it was the right time to broach the topic. “Did you ever find love?”

“ _Dad_.” Immediately, Carnistir was a stroppy teenager again. Funny, how even now it was so easy to revert back into being parent and child.

“I’m just saying, I’ve heard the name Haleth thrown around in relation to you. She was an edain lady, right?”

“ _Oh my god._ Not you, too.” Carnistir’s face had turned the exact shade of red for which he had been named. Fëanáro could see him being born in his mind’s eye – tiny and hollering and puce.

“ _Nothing happened._ ”

“Fine, fine. A father can be curious, can’t he?”

Carnistir let out an irritated noise but then he grinned again. “Don’t give me cause to wish you were still in the Halls.”

*

That night, Fëanáro reassessed his conclusions. Perhaps he had been too hasty, too sure in his certainty that he knew the answer. No doubt that was what his sons were counting on.

But Fëanáro couldn’t make head or tail of the information that Bilbo had given him. Surely, he reasoned, Elrond _couldn’t_ be half-elven on both sides. The hobbit had to be mistaken because that would disqualify all of his sons from the running.

It was a red herring, he assured himself. No doubt Curvo and Turko were behind it. They always were.


	4. Chapter 4

Fëanáro didn’t know why, but for some reason, he was drawn to Turko as his next possible candidate.

It didn’t seem likely, but perhaps that was what his sons were counting on.

Turko had been practically feral as a child, tracking mud through the house, twigs in his hair, telling his father all sort of tales – about how the squirrels in the oak tree were gossiping about the sparrows in the hawthorn and _No, dad, I’m not going to ask them what the sparrows did; they’d know I’d been eavesdropping, then, and that would be rude!_

Turko had once come home with a hound bigger than he was, claiming it had been a gift from Oromë.

“What are you going to name him?” Fëanor had asked at his peril.

“He’s a dog, dad.”

“But surely a dog needs a name,” he had pressed.

Turko had looked at him like he genuinely questioned his father’s sanity. “He’s a _dog_ , dad.” And so Huan had been named.

He supposed it was apt. All anyone seemed to say when they saw Huan was “Look at that _dog_!” He had been big enough that Turko had ridden him around for years like a small horse before he eventually grew too large.

The conclusion that Turko might be Elrond’s father was based on this evidence – they were nothing alike. Would a young man railing against his father not try to be everything that he wasn’t?

Where Turko was wild, Elrond was calm; where Turko was prone to disappearing off into the woods in the middle of the night to follow the Huntsman’s call, Elrond looked far more at home in a well-stocked and organised library.

Fëanáro was aware that he was clutching at straws a little here, but it didn’t hurt to exhaust every avenue of enquiry.

Nothing should be ruled out for certain. Not yet, anyway.

His theory was substantiated, he felt, when he met Elrond’s sons, Elladan and Elrohir. They reminded him so much of a young Turko that he almost couldn’t fathom it. Was this a case of certain traits having skipped a generation, just as his mother’s silver hair had passed him by but found its place again in Turko?

Elrond’s boys seemed difficult to pry out of the forest and he often found them after a hunt collapsed at his kitchen table nursing cups of coffee with Turko, Írissë and Findaráto, the lot of them thick as thieves.

The trouble was, Turko and Elrond were never really found in each other’s presence, so Fëanáro couldn’t make any direct observations about their relationship to each other.

The longer their seeming aloofness to each other’s existence occurred, the more that Fëanáro worried about this potential father-son relationship. Curvo and Tyelpë had grown estranged, he knew, as Curvo had become more and more obsessive about their Oath. A rift which had only been mended on this side of the sea had existed between them in the last years of Curvo’s life and he knew that it was one of his son’s greatest regrets.

He also knew that Curvo and Turko had always been birds of a feather, scheming together since they were children. If Curvo’s own dedication to the Oath had led to the deterioration of his relationship with Tyelpë, had that been what had happened with Elrond and Turko, too?

If that were the case, Fëanáro wasn’t certain that this was a relationship that had been fully mended.

Though it may not have been the best idea, Fëanáro took to inviting Elrond over when he was certain that Turko was around, just to watch the two of them.

He had never seen Turko so cowed.

While Elrond didn’t seem to mind his company at all, Fëanáro watched as his son kept quietly to the edges of rooms or hung back at a distance, seemingly so as not to be caught in conversation with him.

One night, Fëanáro couldn’t take the tension anymore. Knocking gently on Turko’s door he entered when he heard his response.

Turko was the only one of his sons to have kept his room in its childhood state – his possessions all still lay where they had been kept for thousands of years, where his brothers had opted to update their rooms for when they came to stay, reflecting more who they were now, than who they had been. He didn’t know how Nerdanel hadn’t cleared out the rooms – he would have. The idea of leaving them as mausoleums to her departed family seemed too sad to him.

But Nerdanel had always had a little glimmer of foresight. “I knew they would come back – and they might want to sort out their own affairs.”

Seeing Turko in the space now, Fëanáro didn’t really have to wonder at his respect for his childhood décor. Turko was most at home in the time before he had crossed to Beleriand – maybe even more comfortable with the person he had ceased to be.

“I think you have something you need to talk about,” Fëanáro said, sitting at the end of his bed. “About Elrond.”

“Oh.” Turko’s face immediately went closed off, but there was a pain there instantly, flashing across his expression as plain as day.

“You don’t have to talk about it now,” Fëanáro said, “but you should know… Whatever it is, I would never judge you. I wasn’t exactly a saint myself.”

Turko’s smile was sad, wounded. He didn’t say anything for a long time, but he didn’t ask Fëanáro to leave either, so he stayed, clasped his hand, so much larger now than it had been when he was a child, and waited.

There was a sigh – Turko screwed up his face a little, as though debating with himself, and then the story poured forth. Doriath. A young pair of twins – Elrond’s maternal uncles. Hastily given orders in the heat of the moment and under the influence of the Oath – worse, the time he had spent wondering if it hadn’t been the Oath at all, if part of him had become that rotten and twisted that he had truly wanted what he had ordered. He had had a long time in the Halls to ruminate on it.

“Every time I look at him, I see them – he’s so like his mother.” Turko’s hands were balled into fists. “It’s different with Elladan and Elrohir – they have a lot of Celebrían in them, and by extension Artanis; it doesn’t feel the same.”

“Have you talked with him?” Fëanáro asked, finally. “He doesn’t seem the type to bear grudges.”

“No. That’s the problem.” Fëanáro didn’t understand. Turko sighed, raking his hands through his hair. “He _will_ forgive me. Nelyo has all but confirmed it – Káno, too. Sometimes I think Elrond is too unfailingly kind for his own good.” Silence stretched, then, a whisper: “I just don’t think I deserve to be forgiven.”

“It wouldn’t make sense to hold onto it here, I suppose. And he wasn’t born at the time. Maybe he feels it’s not his grudge to bear.”

“Maybe… Sometimes I wish he was like his mother. She socked me in the face and then kneecapped me. It was less than I deserved.”

Their conversation spiralled, as many of Fëanáro’s seemed to these days (there was always too much to catch up on to stop, he found) but when he left Turko, he was confident that, even if Turko thought it was impossible, this was a wound that would one day be healed.

_And_ he had given him some information. Elrond had been born almost into the Second Age. He had precious few sons left in Beleriand at that time, he knew. That left him with only three candidates.


	5. Chapter 5

Since his reembodiment, Valinor had become home to more than just the Eldar. Besides taking afternoon tea and the odd late-night drink with Bilbo, Fëanáro had had the pleasure of meeting his nephew, Frodo, and a dwarf named Gimli.

But the revelation that there were mortal men in Valinor was news even to Fëanáro.

“I thought the hobbits and Gimli were a special case!” Then, “Why haven’t I met them?”

“Oh,” said Nerdanel, who had just mentioned it in passing. It had clearly been quite the event when mortal men had managed to sail across the sea to Valinor – everyone who had been around for it had a story about it, now that he knew about it to ask. “Well, they’re not… reachable.”

The whole sordid story about Númenóreans who sought eternal life being granted it – in the worst possible way – unfurled and Fëanáro grimaced.

“Oh, there’s Tuor, too, I suppose,” Nerdanel added. “He was allowed to stay. Everyone likes Tuor.” It was said as more of an afterthought.

“What made them want to be immortal, anyway? It’s hardly in their nature.”

“Well, I suppose it _was_ in their nature, to an extent,” Nerdanel said, musing and pausing from her sketch of him. _“I haven’t sketched you reembodied,”_ had been her excuse. Fëanáro had never really been loath to pass up an opportunity to be sketched, anyway, so the excuses weren’t needed. He liked to watch her – her green eyes darting to him and then her sketchbook – adjusting and smudging the image there, her lip caught between her teeth, absentmindedly tucking a lock of red hair behind her ear. It was no wonder they had managed to beget seven children.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, they had elvish blood. From Elros.” She frowned at her sketch.

“Elros?”

“Elrond’s twin brother.”

“Why hasn’t this been mentioned before?”

“Stop moving, please,” Nerdanel said and Fëanáro frowned but acquiesced. “And wipe that look off your face.” She hadn’t looked up to see it, but she was right that it was there.

“Elros was the first king of Númenor,” Nerdanel said, filling him in. “He chose mortality and went with the edain into death.”

Fëanáro mulled that over. “Is that a peredhil thing?”

Nerdanel didn’t bat an eyelid at the term. She gave the affirmative, her eyes flitting to his and then back to her paper.

“So, they can choose? That is, Eldar or edain?”

“It would seem so. Elrond’s daughter chose mortality, too. Arwen.”

“So, Elrond could, too? Elladan and Elrohir could?”

“I suppose. You’d have to ask them if you wanted to know more.”

Fëanáro let out a _hmm_ sort of noise. Then he felt a jolt of surprise. Elrond was a twin. Elrond’s sons were twins.

He also knew a twin who might be a contender for the hotly contested role of Elrond’s father.

However, the more he considered this line of enquiry, the less it seemed to make sense. Elrond and Ambarussa didn’t seem to have any discernible relationship to each other that suggested father and son.

That left Nelyo, who had always been inseparable from Findekáno – and who he therefore discarded from the line up out of hand, and Káno.

But Káno’s wife Morna had stayed in Valinor after the Darkening.

Did the marriage bond wane after long years of absence? His with Nerdanel certainly hadn’t been affected by death.

And then, with a start, he felt as though he finally processed what Turko had told him. _None_ of his sons had married a Doriathrin princess, for that was who Elrond’s mother was.

The more he thought about it all, the more convinced he was that _none_ of them were Elrond’s father.

The whole thing was headache inducing, to say the least.

*

“I just don’t understand it!” Fëanáro said, down a bottle and a half of wine at Bilbo’s. They were sat outside his home on small picnic chairs, Fëanáro’s knees practically around his ears. He supposed he should have just sat on the floor, but it had seemed rude to turn down the offer of a seat when it was given by the hobbit. Above them the stars shone brightly. Fëanáro squinted at them. One was particularly bright, twinkling significantly. Vaguely, he got the impression that the star was laughing at him, but that was impossible. How much had he had to drink?

“ _Who_ is Elrond’s father?”

“Elrond?” Bilbo frowned. “Are you sure you don’t mean Gil-galad? He’s the one people usually want to know about.”

“Gil-ga-who?”

“Ah, I see you’re not there yet in terms of catching up on the history of Beleriand,” Bilbo nodded sympathetically. “That’s the true mystery, if you ask me. And Gil-galad himself is so cagey about it – I think he enjoys keeping it a secret. But one day I’ll catch him off guard,” the hobbit said with a smile, as though a thorough plan was already in place to do such a thing.

Fëanáro frowned, not having the slightest clue what was going on, and steered the conversation back to his own quandary.

“He can’t be Pityo’s. Carnistir vehemently denied being his father. Turko, too. Curvo’s having far too much fun with this for it to be him…” Fëanáro trailed off from thinking out loud. “What am I missing? It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“He’s adopted,” Bilbo said.

“I – what?”

“He’s _adopted._ By Maglor and Maedhros.”

Fëanáro’s mind spun, all the pieces clicking into place. Of course, that didn’t make Elrond any less family. Adopted grandsons were worth as much as blood relations, as far as he was concerned. And it did make sense when it came to the parentage. His theory – that all of his sons were impossible candidates – had been correct, then. Oh, he couldn’t wait to tell Curvo. He had figured it out. It had been a trick question the entire time.

But then he remembered what Nerdanel had said, her face coy, all those weeks ago. _There are elements of Turgon in him. He has his ears._

“Just out of curiosity,” he hedged. “Who _is_ Elrond’s father?”

“Well, Eärendil, of course.”

_Do you really want to pass up to look on dad’s face when he finds out who Elrond’s father is?_

Fëanáro didn’t really see why that was cause for any response at all. There was something else to this – enough that his sons had been willing to continue the charade on a long-term basis, just to see his response.

“Should I know who he is?”

“My, my, you really are behind,” Bilbo frowned. “Whatever have they been telling you, these sons of yours? Well, Eärendil is one of Fingolfin’s descendants…”

Fëanáro didn’t hear what else the hobbit had to say on the topic. A sort of buzzing sound had taken up in his ears, and distantly he registered the wine glass he was holding smash in his fist.

_Ñolofinwë._

“… I even wrote a ballad about him with the young Elessar, you know. _Eärendil Was a Mariner_. It was quite successful, if I do say so myself…”

The star above them twinkled with mirth. If Fëanáro wasn’t so thunderstruck, he might have noticed that it almost looked as though it had winked.


End file.
